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Worldwide Shipments
Overnight Deliveries
Free Shipping on most Dollhouse Kits over $150
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Press Releases for Manhattan Dollhouse, Sutton Miniatures and our Dollhouse Department in FAO Schwarz
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Housman communications
http://hausmanllc.wordpress.com/page/2/?archives-list=1
June 22, 2011
Small Houses with Big Design
Second generation, family owned Manhattan Dollhouse, has been designing custom dollhouses in New York City since 1976. The dollhouses are sold in a miniature store within FAO Schwarz on Fifth Avenue. We caught up with the one of the owners of Manhattan Dollhouse Barbara Jacobowitz, co-owned with her husband Edwin, to learn about design behind dollhouses.
Q. How did you learn the dollhouse design trade?
A. It actually started with my dad and my stepmother. She had a toy store for many years and then developed a passion for miniatures. They had two stores and then converted one store to specialize in dollhouses and miniatures in 1976. My husband and I worked in the store during the holidays and gradually took over the business. Now, we are in FAO Schwarz and we have the third generation working with us.
Q. How are custom dollhouses brought to life?
A. They are brought to life with your own decorations and dolls. The owner will choose which period they want to display and they choose colors, decorations and modifications. Customers can add most anything they have in their own house, or things, which they can never own, but can have in miniature.
Q. What types of custom dollhouses can you create?
A. We can create most any house in miniature, or based upon a customer’s fantasy. Right now we are creating a New York department store in miniature. A common custom dollhouse project is using a kit and building it to the customer’s specifications (colors, additions, wallpaper, flooring and decorations).
Q. What is the most popular dollhouse model?
A. Last year, it was our Peri Dollhouse. It was a colonial farmhouse specially made for us, completely built, painted, wallpapered and floored.
Q. What are your inspirations for your modern dollhouse collections?
A. As New Yorkers, we love modern dollhouses and found that many of our customers did as well. There were probably more adults buying it for themselves than for children. Most of our traditional dollhouses are either Victorian or Colonial. Our modern dollhouse and furniture work together to create a contemporary feel and we are always looking for new lines to carry in our store or online. We are also adding a new modern apartment house to our collection and should be available this fall.We are now selling battery operated dollhouse lights and have the largest selection in the country. We introduced them to the U.S., Canada, Australia and Europe. They are easy to use, and require no wiring and no fuss, and can be used alone or in conjunction with a wired house. The lights include ceiling, floor, wall, table, and exterior fixtures, as well as crystal chandeliers. Simple watch batteries are used. We also sell a beautiful English Tudor house, where all elements are handmade and the house is electrically wired. It also includes light windows, individually laid floorboards, and at least 120 handmade wooden pegs. These houses are only made to order.
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Easy miniature and hobby lighting, no fuss, no mess. Lights within seconds! No more
complicated electrical wiring to achieve realistic "greenl"it dollhouses, roomboxes, or miniatures
scenes.
Fort Lee, NJ (PRWEB) October 19, 2010 -- Manhattan Dollhouse has an EXCLUSIVE new series of miniature
dollhouse LED lights that are battery powered and will look great in any Dollhouse, Room box or any
Miniature Display Scene. Their lights are truly unique and beautiful, and are available as decorative wall
sconces, attractive ceiling fixtures and eye-catching multi light chandeliers. All come immediately operational
with batteries and an adhesive stick pad that can be instantly mounted on any interior or exterior walls.
Dollhouse’s and Room boxes can be lit up within seconds! These beautiful lights can be used instead of the
wire operated lights, added to hard to reach places, or just an addition to your electrified dollhouse or miniature
display. Extra batteries are included with each lamp and the mini LED bulbs last approximately 4000 hours,
before replacements are needed. Many other styles, including crystal chandeliers, are available and in stock for
immediate delivery. These lights can be found ONLY at FAO Schwarz and other select fine miniature stores
around the country or online at www.manhattandollhouse.com
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October 2010- -Our dollhouse department within FAO Schwarz supplied various publications, such as the winning Elle Decor, with miniatures for the Operations Dollhouse contest. When word hit that Elle Decor would be up and moving offices the exact same day as the Operation Dollhouse deadline, dread befell the Curbed National HQ that perhaps the most fashion-y of all the shelter pubs wouldn't be able to complete their task. But market editrix extraordinaire Erin Swift assured us that despite parent company Hachette Filipacchi's shutting down the entire computer system at 5 p.m. last Friday to prepare for the move, the photos of the ED dollhouse would be in our hands on Monday, come hell or high water.
So imagine our delight when the photos popped up in our Inbox earlier this week, along with an eloquent little note from new editor in chief Michael Boodro: "Even as we move ahead—new editor, new offices—we wanted to salute some items that have become 'signature' emblems of Elle Decor style," he wrote. "It wouldn't be an ED house—or dollhouse—without bold colors, stripes, and patterns; a chandelier; contemporary art; and a few iconic pieces such as the Rietveld Zig-Zag chair and the Noguchi cocktail table." To convey this narrative, the team called upon Sutton Miniatures at FAO Schwarz, ELF Miniatures, and Benjamin Moore to dress the interiors (and exterior!), turning it into a mock ED feature spread—uber-recognizable signature fonts included. File under: brilliant.
Here's what was delivered to the Elle Decor offices:
See article..... ,
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As Featured in Time Out New York Kids Magazine March-April 2006, Issue 11
Best Dollhouses
Manhattan Dollhouse
“Finally, affordable real estate in the city! Young architects and designers in the making will be wowed by the dozens of Architectural Digest-worthy houses that pack this quaint, 30-year-old Murray Hill Store. Here, dollhouse kits, as well as preassembled minimansions, dolls and dollhouse components (i.e. moldings, windows and furniture), are sold to novice and accomplished dollhouse builders alike. Tots crowd the aisles to gape at the teeny dining rooms and impressively well-stocked kitchens and discuss what color they want to paint their own prospective homes.
Owner Edwin Jacobowitz prides himself on his personal service, and you’ll often see him offering help in choosing among the store’s 300 wallpapers or building a Classic Colonial from a $250.00 kit. Doll up your house with any of the sort of hundreds of accessories, including ice-cream makers ($5), rug beaters ($3.50) and Kingsford charcoal briquettes ($6). Just remind your curious tykes that there’s a no-touching rule here, and keep an eye on roving hands.”
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Spending on a Grand But Tiny Scale: the $10,000 Dolls' House
Exact miniature replicas often double the cost of grown-ups' nostalgia.
Edwin Jacobowitz has just spent the afternoon doing up a two-storey colonial-style house in New Jersey. It's been hard work. First he had to wire the house for electricity, applying a chandelier in the dining room and spotlights elsewhere. Then he wallpapered five rooms, each with a separate printed design to the owner's specification. After that he laid red oak floors throughout, glazed the windows and put the roof on, laying shingles in a patterned effect. By the end he'd built up quite a sweat.
Mr Jacobowitz's afternoon may sound like Extreme Makeover on amphetamine, but the reason he can accomplish it all in one afternoon is that he works on a scale unfamiliar to most builders and interior designers. Mr Jacobowitz is a master of the miniature; dolls' houses to you and me. He runs a family business which has made manifest the fantasies of little girls and boys, and their parents, for more than 30 years.
Mr Jacobowitz has moved his shop from Gramercy Park in downtown New York into Manhattan's most famous children's store, FAO Schwarz by Central Park.
On the first floor, sandwiched between Paw Parazzi pets and model paints, Mr Jacobowitz has pitched his dolls' house boutique, peddling dreams seven days a week. You don't have to be rich to partake: some kits start at $20 (£10). But the great thing about his store is that if you are rich, you can certainly spend. Step right up and buy a hand-painted Victorian four-poster bed, about the size of a cigar box, for $600. Or the Queen bed with silk drapes that he sold to a woman last week for $500 - her son had wanted it for a school project.
Most of the houses on display are classic American clapper board, the kind you'll find all down the east coast. There's a Boston house with dormer windows and arches above the doors and solid colonial residences that are straight out of the suburbs. The pride of the display is what Mr Jacobowitz describes as a federal style 10-room house common on Long Beach island, the Hamptons or Cape May on the New Jersey shore. It has 32 windows and 2,100 wooden shingles on the roof, each one hand laid. It costs $5,000 to buy ready made, but clients often double that amount once they have furnished it.
And that's just the kits. The real beauty of what Mr Jacobowitz can offer is in the customised service. Take the woman who arrived in the shop at 9am and left at 6pm - she spent the entire day, bar one hour off for lunch, measuring, comparing and selecting fittings for the dolls' house she bought. Or the former wife of the governor of Oklahoma, who has commissioned Mr Jacobowitz to make an exact miniature replica of the mansion they restored in Oklahoma City. Or the man who bought a special wedding anniversary gift for his wife who loved Proust so much that he asked Mr Jacobowitz to make a replica of the novelist's Parisian apartment, modelled from pictures at the Proust museum.
His own favourite, though, was the time when a major Manhattan company contacted him and asked him to build a present for the retiring president. He loved his office so much, and had spent so much of his life inside it, they wanted to give him a miniature version of it, replete with antique furniture made to match, sofas in precisely the same material, and identical lamps and light fittings. It was presented to the president on board the cruise the firm gave him as a parting gesture. He was, Mr Jacobowitz said, overwhelmed.
A pattern by now is clearly emerging. The people who are most obsessed by toys, most wrapped up in childhood fantasies, are not children at all, but grown-up kids doing all they can to cling on to their dreams.
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Little House in the Big City
real estate for tots.
In Manhattan, even the smallest houses are horrifyingly expensive. And we do mean the smallest: This season has marked the arrival of FAO Schwarz’s first custom dollhouse boutique, where prices start at $10,000. Ed Jacobowitz, owner of Manhattan Dollhouse, shut the doors to his Gramercy hobby shop earlier this year, after he struck a deal with FAO to relocate within the Fifth Avenue mega toy store. Though he’ll carry off-the-rack dollhouses and do-it-yourself kits for a few hundred dollars, the real draw is his build-it-from-the-ground-up service. (He says FAO customers have not shown much interest in doing the cutting, pasting, and hammering.) During my recent visit to the store, Jacobowitz pointed out a recently completed pink-and-purple Queen Anne manse behind the counter, one with walnut floors, 1,900 roof shingles, and different wallpaper in each room. Though there are DO NOT TOUCH signs scattered around the shop, he did let me handle a silk-and-gold gilded sofa ($85) and pick up the metal bed with embroidered rolled pillows, yellowed lace, and velvet blankets ($275). Besides building these houses, Jacobowitz also does renovations, adding extensions on demand. He notes that half the grown-up customers who go to contract on these houses aren’t buying for their kids. We have a lot of women who come in and say there were poor as children, he says. They are the ones who want the big houses. Sometimes we sell two houses, one for mom and one for the child.
FAO Schwarz, 767 Fifth Ave., at 58th St. (212-644-9400 or fao.com).
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Prices are subject to change without notice
Contact Us.
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Manhattan Dollhouse Shop has everything you could want for your dollhouse and dollhouse kit as well as many dollhouse accessories to choose from.
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